The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Read online

  In a short story, the writer has to do it all right away—establish the tone, ensnare the reader, and make us want more. Dave King does all three just right in “The Stamp Collector.”

  “More or Less Like a Man” by Michael Powers is a gentle story filled with violence, a story about a brief meeting between two people who have no luck in love. One is a middle-aged Slovenian woman who’s fallen in love with the exact wrong man. She’s an immigrant and so is he. Together, they’re not just learning English but shaking it to see its roots. The consequences of her affair are unbearably painful.

  She’s on a plane to San Francisco in the middle seat between a man who is sleeping at the window and our narrator on the aisle. She remarks that she’s fleeing. The narrator responds in a completely understandable way: “Okay, I thought, here we go.”

  But if anyone could use some conversation, it’s our narrator.

  Often in fiction, the writer chooses to provide a character’s background information to the reader in one chunk of prose and then go on with the action. Michael Powers makes a different choice. Until the last paragraph, the only things we know about the narrator are that he dislikes talking to strangers on airplanes and that he’s been to New Jersey. In the last paragraphs, the story blooms and the narrator reveals himself while returning us to the beginning, which we see in a new way.

  Cassandra seems to be flirting with HM, hero of Jo Lloyd’s “The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies,” nibbling his fingers and blowing nose kisses into his palm. She is a well-named horse, and when she turns to look around, HM knows that she is out to get his attention and keep it. Aside from his horse, HM is accompanied by the gloomy Shiers, “HM’s most trusted employee yet tedious companion,” and by Tall John, an all-around reprobate who considers himself “a second Adam, more free than a freeborn gentleman.”

  The title of Jo Lloyd’s story comes from Thomas Yalden’s poem “To Sir Humphrey Mackworth”; Mackworth was a politician and industrialist in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s difficult not to identify our hero HM with Sir Humphrey, whose later life was besmirched by a scandal but who lived to the then ripe age of seventy. Historical accuracy doesn’t really matter, though.

  The pleasure of Lloyd’s story, aside from her successful imagining, is her use of language as she constructs both narrative and dialogue in a convincing idiom. She dances us through the tale of HM, “founding director and deputy governor of the Company of Mine Adventurers,” as he attempts to verify for the company Tall John’s claim that he’s found “a seam of finest ore, right on the surface, fat and firm as floorboards.”

  Is Tall John’s story too good to be true? Is it a test of HM’s temperament and judgment? A trap? Knavery on the part of HM’s enemies? Cassandra thinks so.

  “The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies” also delves into the ever-present British question of class. HM has the unfortunate habits of feeling sorry for himself and comparing himself to others. He wishes to be praised more than he is and wants to be recognized as financially successful and also charitable to the poor, a good provider, industrious, and in possession of “excellent judgment.” He has what seems like plenty, yet he’s self-conscious, touchy, and defensive.

  At its end, the story opens up with a hymn that looks ahead to England after the Industrial Revolution when it’s been turned by men like HM from the rich, dense fields and forests through which he rides into a dark place where “the stars, the planets, the moon herself are dimmed by the glitter of furnaces.”

  Tristan Hughes’s “Up Here” is set in the contemporary countryside, where the narrator lives with his girlfriend, a naturalist in a “park that surrounded” them. She’s made the decision that her dog, old and in pain, needs to be killed. “Her body was slowing, her insides were failing, her bones were going: she had to be careful about each move she made.” The narrator, though he’s never before done such a thing, volunteers to kill the dog himself. To pile on another difficulty, he likes the dog, old and sick as she is. He makes his promise partly because he’s drunk and partly because “up here, it was the kind of thing you did for your lover. In other places, you might be expected to do other things.”

  He’s in thrall to his girlfriend and the place where they live. “I watched my girlfriend dive and swim. The elegant arch of her back, the easy grace of her swimming strokes—how beautiful and unencumbered she appeared, uplifted by the light and water. How lucky we were to live on a lake like this! How golden our lives seemed, lived so far away from anywhere!”

  He’s both lucky and unlucky, too tentative to call the place his own or to relax his nervous eagerness to please his lover. He soon discovers that nature doesn’t care what he feels or does, another aspect of living in a beautiful wilderness. “Up Here” is a pastoral of sorts, a love story told in full awareness of how often failure greets those who solve their problems by moving to a paradise.

  Brenda Walker’s “The Houses That Are Left Behind” is also, at least in part, about place.

  It’s a Sunday afternoon. The narrator’s cooking for her husband’s children, who come weekly for a meal and a visit. Her husband’s reading in the sun. Is this another paradise? Perhaps. But then the bell rings, and a young woman, weeping, tells them a ridiculous story. She gets them wondering—did she want to get into their apartment building? If so, why?

  Walker’s story is about places that used to mean something and about the consistency of uncertainty. Once there was a lovely new home, but, no, it was a house about to burn. There was a kind and helpful neighbor, someone else’s husband, a lawyer on vacation, but, no, he was a stalker. Now there’s a new place, a new home for the narrator and her husband, yet it’s also a place where strangers meet for secret assignations—until the lock is changed, and then what becomes of them?

  In deliberate and evocative prose that never asks to be admired but is, Brenda Walker relates the narrator’s several lives and pasts before she arrived at the apartment where on a Sunday afternoon she’s cooking for her husband’s children. Those lives are one story, she’s saying. The other story is the secret one that houses live without us.

  Stephanie A. Vega’s story “We Keep Them Anyway” is about another kind of mystery, the universal desire to hear from the dead and missing. Ña Meli arrives out of nowhere, almost uneducated, “poor among the beggars,” perhaps a mystic, perhaps a charlatan. The neighborhood of La Chacarita is a collection of shanties made of “cardboard boxes and corrugated metal….It clung to the lip of the river—muddy, smelly, filled with mosquitoes—like a howling, injured beast.” Ña Meli offers the residents of La Chacarita an occasion for skepticism or hope. Her gift, or trick, is to write letters in a clear handwriting unlike her normal scrawl, using words she doesn’t know, sometimes even in a language she doesn’t know. The letters are dictated to her by those she calls her visitors.

  Ña Meli lives down a dirt path from the narrator and offers him a message from his missing brother, “a small-time agitator.” He passes up the opportunity, figuring that for Ña Meli’s fee he could get a Coca-Cola or even an empanada.

  Eventually, naturally, he succumbs to temptation. Little by little, he and Ña Meli become friends and stay close until she joins her visitors in death. Ña Meli is faithful to those dictating visitors but also feels an obligation to the living recipients, so she sometimes writes, “ ‘Burn this. Do not keep it,’ ” on the letters. “As Ña Meli wrote the letter for me I thought, What good does it do me to know it was muddy after the rain and he slipped?” The narrator warns her not to write dangerous letters, and she replies, “ ‘Imbécil! It’s not me. They visit me.’ ” One of the hazards of their lives is the political regime they live under, and Ña Meli is on the losing side.

  There’s no forced magical realism in “We Keep Them Anyway,” rather there’s the plentiful magic of reality. There might be no use, as the narrator argues, in knowing how some
one you love died of torture, yet Ña Meli’s visitors dictate the exact details and those left behind do want to know them. How deeply people love and miss the ones who’ve gone into death or the unknown—these everyday mysteries are the magical components in La Chacarita.

  Throughout “Solstice,” Anne Enright uses aspects of that twice-yearly occasion: darkness and light, beginning and end, that which we notice and that which we overlook, what we share and what we keep selfishly to ourselves, the intimacy and loneliness of family life.

  “It was the year’s turning,” Enright begins. “These few hours like the blink of a great eye—just enough light to check that the world is still there, before shutting back down.”

  Ross makes his slow way home through sticky Dublin traffic. He meant to leave work early but didn’t. The darkness of the longest night of the year catches him by surprise. Then he can’t find his car in the office garage. “It felt like the end of things. Made you want your religion back.” A muted feeling of wanting something back—religion, family, marriage, any source of lightness—suffuses the story.

  Evening is no one’s best time in this family. Ruth, the daughter of the house, is on her phone and won’t get off it. Dinner’s on the way, absorbing Ross’s wife’s attention. His ten-year-old son’s contribution to their dinner conversation, which is about the death of their cat’s mother—(“ ‘Animals believe in death’ ”)—annoys Ross, and this provokes his wife. She’s already annoyed with him: “His wife with a look that says, Christmas is coming and it is all your fault.”

  It takes the morning sun’s delayed entrance to unite at least part of the family. Father and son greet the new light in a united silence: “Nothing happened, but they know it was there. The tiny stretch of daylight that will become summer.”

  —Laura Furman

  Austin, Texas

  Jo Ann Beard

  The Tomb of Wrestling

  SHE STRUCK HER ATTACKER in the head with a shovel, a small one that she normally kept in the trunk of her car for moving things off the highway. There was a certain time of year in upstate New York when the turtles left their reedy ponds to crawl ponderously through the countryside, and wound up strewn like pottery shards across the road. The box turtles Joan could pick up with her hands; this was the shovel she had purchased to move the snappers to the ditches. Luckily, she had taken it from her trunk in order to straighten out her compost situation. The barrel stank so terribly that her neighbor had mentioned it, an aerobic smell of digestion, of tomatoes and corncobs and coffee grounds combining to form such a bright sharp stink that the neighbor, who lived down the road and was loaning her a gutter-cleaning attachment for her hose, suggested Joan start alternating small shovelfuls of soil with each bucket of food scraps. So the shovel was leaned up against the side of the house, right next to the kitchen door, a few inches of its business end buried in a torn-open fifty-pound bag of peat slumped on its side. She hadn’t torn the bag open like that; it wasn’t her style—she was a person who stowed a shovel in her trunk for rescuing amphibians. The bag had been torn open by her husband, a man who sometimes was so impatient he would tear right into the side of a package of bread if the twist tie was snarled. It was not the most appealing trait, and yet in this moment, glimpsing the gaping hole in the plastic, Joan felt a surge of protective instinct where her husband was concerned. She had to save his wife! So she reached down, lifted the ergonomic-handled, titanium-headed shovel, and stepped into her kitchen with it.

  The stranger was standing with his back to her, staring into the refrigerator. In the split instant when he knew she was standing behind him, but hadn’t begun to turn yet, Joan heard the mechanical whir of a hummingbird sipping angrily at the feeder. The hummingbirds had bad personalities, always trying to spear each other away from the trumpet vines and the feeders, their thumb-sized shimmering bodies aglow with bad intentions. She couldn’t think how hard to hit him—it seemed first of all terrible to hit him but also wonderful. Inevitable. She had to do it or he would realize she hadn’t died when he strangled her and would come after her again. Or one of the dogs. He seemed to hate the dogs, and the big one, Pilgrim, had attacked him and been kicked a number of times for it. It was brutal and routine, as though he were dispatching a duty that he neither agreed nor disagreed with. The dog had retired with a prolonged yelp to some dark area inside the honeysuckle. The little one, Spock, right now was whining and raking his toenails on the side door, making long feverish gouges in the wood. Joan could see the gouges in her mind’s eye, some tiny part of her brain still attuned to home maintenance.

  She decided in that split instant between the man’s hackles rising, almost visibly, and his beginning the turn away from the refrigerator and toward her that she was going to hit him in the head with the shovel using every bit of force she could summon. She was a slight woman…or no, she wasn’t; she had been a slight woman, but now, depending on how you defined it, she was middle-aged. Her arms and legs were still decently coltish, but her torso had all the nuance of a toilet paper tube. She had lost her beauty before she ever even knew she had it; looking at old photographs, Joan saw that she had been willowy, soulful, glossy haired the entire time that she was thinking of herself as stark, bug faced, lank.

  She couldn’t imagine using all her force; it went against who she was—female, for starters—but there was no choice. Having never hit someone with a shovel, or even with her fist, before, she didn’t know what to expect with less than a full effort, or for that matter with a full effort; so it stood to reason that she had to let fly completely and utterly, otherwise what if it only stunned him, or pissed him off? She took a step forward, grabbing the very end of the shaft, the physics of it returning to her from something she had learned working at an art gallery many years ago.

  “Let the hammer work for you,” Roy had said to her, showing Joan how to hold the hammer near the end, allowing the weight of the head to add momentum to the swing. Roy had been pretty far out there, for an Iowan—he had kinky hair that rose straight up from his scalp like blond flames, wore sharkskin shirts and baggy cuffed pants, and made sculptures out of found materials; back then, big, complicated, beautifully crafted assemblages with baseball themes. He was the director of the gallery, and when he was excited would take off and run straight up the wall, leaving sneaker tracks that she had to paint over. When they were finished hanging the shows, he would climb up onto the tallest stepladder they had and jump it like a big pogo stick down the rows of track lighting, adjusting each lamp in turn so that the paintings were perfectly illuminated. After she had worked with him for five years Joan was forced to make a rule that he couldn’t ride his bike inside her house.

  So instead of choking up on the shovel handle, the way she might have automatically done, considering all the times her first husband had shown her how to choke up in order to really smack the Wiffle ball down the back sidewalk into the pitcher’s face (their friend Kurt, stoned and graceful), she remembered Roy’s advice, and the destructive, comforting weight of that old art gallery hammer as she swung it toward a nail. Joan lifted the shovel end as high as her ear, and put all her weight behind the swing.

  Unbelievable, the small details you notice. He had a piece of individually wrapped cheese in his hand when he whirled around. She was actually embarrassed about that cheese, had put it in her shopping cart with the idle thought that she’d better not run into anyone at the checkout and have it revealed that she sometimes broke down and bought cheese food instead of cheese, just for the sheer laziness of peeling the cellophane away and slapping the orange tile directly onto the bread. Her husband couldn’t believe she ate that crap—just yesterday, when she was making a sandwich with it, he had looked over her shoulder and said, “We can do better than that, can’t we?”

  So, the man was holding her secret cheese and swiftly turning around and the refrigerator door bounced against the wall and the shovel made a clanging sound
, that’s how hard she hit him.

  It rang, titanium on bone, like a clapper on a bell. She might have thought that the worst sound would be a melon-like sound, but it wasn’t. This was the worst sound a person’s head could make—a muffled bell-like gonging, like a gravedigger hitting rock.

  But maybe the melon sound would be better, though gorier, because what if the gonging meant that the man’s head was preternaturally hard, that the shovel had met its match? Once when she had flipped a turtle and scooped it up, instead of retracting into its shell it lolled its head out toward her, upside down, opening and closing its beak fitfully. When she set it in the tall grass and flipped it right side up its feet came out lightning fast and it turned on the shovel. For an instant, she had felt the mighty turtle’s strength and rage, right through the titanium and the wood handle. It had shaken the shovel like a terrier would shake a knotted sock before continuing on its prehistoric way, the tall grass shivering in its wake.

  The man, the stranger who had her blood on his hands, who was still holding the square of cheese between his thumb and forefinger, didn’t fly sideways to accommodate the spade thudding into his temple; that was what she half expected, him flying sideways into the cereal and wineglass cupboard, but her experience with this sort of thing heretofore was from cartoons. None of these thoughts were going through her mind, of course; they were more like synaptic realizations, pulses of understanding, except that understanding implies process. There was no process, no hesitation, because she was operating like a simple organism in that moment, one that is programmed to survive, like a sperm, or a hammerhead shark.